The male has beige legs with darker rings.
The head and thorax are reddish brown, and the abdomen is mottled greyish brown and beige.
Male Austrarchaea westi bears a minute bulb on the tip of its leg-like mouthpart, the pedipalp. In the described specimen, the bulb’s width is much less than 0.3 millimetres. The slender inner embolus is relatively short, with its tip enclosed within the supporting conductor. These are tiny structural features within a male measuring 3.13 millimetres in body length.
The male and juvenile examined in the 2012 paper were collected on 2 December 1993 at Mount Williams in the Lamb Range, from trees and logs in rainforest at 1000 metres. The researchers dissected male left pedipalps and aligned them consistently for microscopic comparison. Westi’s palp was recognised as a distinctive type among the northeastern Queensland species treated in the paper. The small male specimen from upland rainforest thus preserves an unusual form of this mouth-adjacent appendage.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
Dinden National Park’s 2013 management statement, extended in 2024, calls for fire-sensitive vegetation communities to be protected from fire. It also directs managers to identify knowledge gaps requiring research, monitoring and assessment for conservation. These are park-wide directions encompassing the upland rainforest in which westi has been documented.